Top News
HathiTrust Welcomes Five New Members
We are very pleased to announce Brigham Young University, McMaster University, University of Cincinnati, University of Hawaiʻi, and Texas State University have joined the HathiTrust member community. See our full membership list on our website. (We are currently adding new members to this page!)
Strategic Directions 2019-2023 Update
The Board of Governors met in March and ratified HathiTrust’s Strategic Directions 2019-2023, the document that lays out HathiTrust’s five-year strategic plan. We are currently sharing it with our staff and member libraries as part of an early planning phase. We will make the complete plan available to our broader community later this month and announce it in this publication. We are also developing activities to take place this summer during which member libraries and other interested parties can learn more about how they can be involved and play a role in shaping the future of HathiTrust.
Members currently studying HathiTrust’s Strategic Directions 2019-2023 may submit questions to directions@hathitrust.org.
PSC Call for Nominations: Thank You
Thank you for submitting your nominations for new members to join the Program Steering Committee this year. We accepted nominations through May 1 and the Board of Governors will appoint new members at its June 7 meeting.
The PSC is charged with reviewing HathiTrust’s development agenda, shaping initiatives and strategies for Board discussion and decision-making, and considering the implications of those initiatives for the future.
From the Collection
Caption: Sir Humphry Davy's Gas Machine
Title: Victory over pain, a history of anesthesia
Author: Robinson, Victor, 1886-1947
Published: New York, Schuman [1946]
Current Activities
Members: Submit Your Annual Print Holdings Updates
The annual call for updated print holdings is now underway. HathiTrust relies on accurate print holdings data from our membership to provide core services and calculate annual fees. If you’ve already submitted updated holdings for your institution, thank you! If not, please plan to do so by June 30, 2018.
Full instructions may be found on our website. If you have any questions, please check our print holdings help page or contact feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.
Thank you in advance for your timely completion of this important task.
Copyright Review Program
Many thanks go to Judy Marsh from Stanford University (HathiTrust member since 2010) and Lura Joseph at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ( HathiTrust member since 2008), who are retiring from their institutions. While volunteering for the Copyright Review Program, Judy Marsh completed 2,588 copyright reviews and was responsible for opening more than 1,300 public domain books. Lura Joseph completed 2,766 copyright reviews and found more than 1,500 public domain books.
Between the two of them, these reviewers made 2,800 works available for full view by any HathiTrust user.
We are very grateful for their contributions and wish them well in retirement!
Completing training this month and starting work on U.S. Monographs copyright review is:
- Acacia Ramey, University of Florida
| MARCH 2018 | OVERALL | ||
| Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations |
CRMS-US | 3,678 (78.8%) | 4,670 | 220,912 (55.3%) | 399,342 |
CRMS-World | 373 (66.1%) | 564 | 159,937 (51%) | 313,361 |
Save the Date: Webinar on Opening Works via Creative Commons License
Don’t forget to save the date for the webinar on Tuesday, May 8, from 2 to 3 pm ET, in which Copyright Review Program Manager, Kristina Eden, will discuss how to apply Creative Commons licenses to works in HathiTrust.
Webinar objectives:
- Understand the permissions process and how to open a work in HathiTrust with a Creative Commons license
- Learn about the support available from HathiTrust to member institutions embarking on local rights permission projects
HathiTrust member webinar: Opening Works via Creative Commons License
Join the webinar via BlueJeans: https://bluejeans.com/379611243
HathiTrust Research Center
HTRC Summer Workshops: Text Mining for Librarians
Are you a librarian interested in learning more about digital humanities methods and text mining?
Registration is now open for July and August workshops in San Diego, Seattle, and Honolulu as a part of the IMLS-funded project “Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources” (DDRF) project.
These 1-day workshops introduce library and information professionals to text mining and related digital scholarship methods, with a focus on the tools and data from the HathiTrust Research Center. The aims of the DDRF workshops are to empower librarians to become more conversant in digital scholarship and engage with digital projects at their institutions.
Limited seats remain for the May 2018 workshop in Houston, and registration will open soon for workshops in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and New York.
You DO NOT need to be a member library affiliate to attend and no experience is necessary!
View the full calendar and registration forms for upcoming DDRF workshops.
Contact htrc_workshop@library.illinois.edu with any questions.
This workshop series is funded in part by IMLS award #RE-00-15-0112-15.
HathiTrust Member Libraries Hosting Spring & Summer 2018 Workshops
Columbia University (HathiTrust member since 2009)
Library of Congress (HathiTrust member since 2011)
Tulane University (HathiTrust member since 2016)
University of California, San Diego (HathiTrust member since 2009)
University of Hawaii at Manoa (HathiTrust member since 2018)
University of Houston (HathiTrust member since 2013)
University of Kansas (HathiTrust member since 2012)
University of Washington (HathiTrust member since 2010)
Don’t Forget: HTRC Office Hours on May 9
The HathiTrust Research Center now offers a support service for research and teaching with HTRC called HTRC, Help! Scholars and librarians with questions about computational text analysis using HathiTrust corpus data can now join monthly virtual office hours, held the second Wednesday of each month at 3:00 p.m. ET. An expert from the HTRC will answer questions and discuss research projects. Additionally, extended answers to frequently asked questions about HTRC are shared online.
Upcoming office hours dates: May 9, 3:00 p.m. ET
Join office hours (via Zoom): http://go.illinois.edu/htrchelp-live
Shared Print Program
HathiTrust is finishing up Phase 1 and launching Phase 2 of the Shared Print Program. Phase 1 Retention Libraries have been asked to record their retention commitments in their local catalogs and HathiTrust is developing retention comparison reports to show any member library which of its monograph holdings are being retained by other HathiTrust libraries.
Phase 2 will begin in the next couple of months, during which we will seek commitments to retain an additional 2.2 million monograph titles found in HathiTrust. Contract negotiation is underway with a supplier to provide holdings analysis services to help identify retention commitments in Phase 2. This work is expected to begin in summer 2018 and conclude with new commitments and Retention Libraries around the end of the year.
For details of these and other activities, please see our Shared Print Program Update for May 2018.
U.S. Federal Documents Program
HathiTrust is invested in building a comprehensive digital collection of U.S. federal documents and in providing a high-quality discovery and access experience for our users. In April we launched a survey to learn more about the users of federal government documents in the HathiTrust Digital Library to better understand why individuals use HathiTrust, the other information sources they use for accessing federal documents, and their opinions on HathiTrust’s content and interface.
We had a great response to the survey and are in the process of analyzing all the information we received. We’ll use this valuable feedback to help identify next steps to improve both the collection and the access experience. Thank you to all who participated in the survey!
If you didn't complete the survey but are a Fed Docs user and would like to share feedback on the U.S. Fed Docs collection in HathiTrust, please contact Heather Christenson (christeh@hathitrust.org).
In the News, Publications, and Research
Interview with University of Michigan President Emerita Mary Sue Coleman and former provost Paul Courant
NPR: StoryCorps
April 2018
As part of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial celebration in 2017, StoryCorps conducted a series of interviews. In this episode, U-M President Emerita Mary Sue Coleman and former U-M Provost Paul Courant discuss the role the University of Michigan played in the birth of the Google Books project, and how it led to the creation of the HathiTrust Digital Library.
“...we used this collection, largely scanned by Google, to start this cooperative digital library. And from the very beginning, we had put into the original memorandum of agreement, that we were going to be allowed to use the works in consortial ways, in the academic sector.” — Paul Courant
Text Duplication in Massive Digital Collections
IMLS National Leadership Grant: LG-86-18-0061-18
Peter Organisciak, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, University of Denver
Grant Period: 2018-2020
The University of Denver, in collaboration with Northeastern University, will perform a content-based study of text duplication and similarity in massive digital library collections like the HathiTrust Digital Library. Content-based analysis of large digital libraries is an emerging research domain in the humanities, but its effectiveness is limited by text duplications and variations. The research will work to overcome the biases of these duplicated and variant texts by developing tools to identify multiple levels of similarity.
HathiTrust Staff on the Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events. Please contact us if you wish to meet us at any of these events!
- Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Conference, May 30-31, Champaign, IL: Sandra McIntyre
- Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2018, June 3-6, Ft. Worth, TX: Sandra McIntyre
- American Library Association Annual Conference 2018, June 21-26, New Orleans, LA: Heather Christenson, Lizanne Payne, Valerie Glenn
News or Research to Share?
If you or a patron at your institution has any news to share regarding a publication, presentation, grant, or research underway related to HathiTrust, we’d love to hear about it. Please share with Jessica Rohr, Member Engagement and Communications Specialist, at jbelle@hathitrust.org.